Unused collection of Interplanetary Postage Stamps in very good condition. The two different stamps were designed by Russell Swanson for the 1953 11th World Science Fiction Convention (PhilCon II) in Philadelphia, PA. One stamp is marked “Luna Colony Postage; First Moon Rocket – 1965; a $5 blue horizontal. The other stamp is a $10 red vertical, “Mars Postage; First Mars Expedition, 1974, and depicted “Preparing the Atmosphere Rocket”. In 1953, these were sold in sheets of 40 for 50 cents by the PhilCon II Committee for publicity and revenue.

(4) I PITY THE FOOL. Will R. can’t get rid of the haunting feeling that he’s been fooled twice by Gmail’s “mic drop” button. Will says —

Though the laugh may still be on me, just so you know: the retraction followed the announcement, and there are actual comments out there (not just the questionable Twitter grabs) from people who seem to confirm that the button was real for at least a while. I admit, though, that it feels a bit phildickian trying to pin it down now, that it would indeed be a clever metaprank if the button never were real, that I’m certainly never long from playing the fool again, and that I hope whatever joke there ever was here is now wrung out.

Really, only meant to apologise if I had steered someone toward a harmful link. No joke!

(5) SPACE PARTY. Yuri’s Night is the World Space Party, celebrated at events on and around April 12.

Yuri’s Night is a global celebration of humanity’s past, present, and future in space. Yuri’s Night parties and events are held around the world every April in commemoration of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to venture into space on April 12, 1961, and the inaugural launch of the first Space Shuttle on April 12, 1981.

“Circling the Earth in my orbital spaceship I marveled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty — not destroy it!” — Yuri Gagarin, 1st human in space….

Since 2001, Yuri’s Night has:

Featured talks and presentations by Ray Bradbury, Will Wright, George Takei, Richard Garriott, Anousheh Ansari, and many others

Been celebrated at the South Pole, Hayden Planetarium, and in orbit on the International Space Station

Planted hundreds of “moon trees” around the world in collaboration with American Forests

Received the “Best Presentation of Space” award from the Space Frontier Foundation

Trained the next generation of space leaders for organizations such as the National Space Society, Virgin Galactic, and Space Florida

Anyone can start a Yuri’s Night event, and it’s completely free.

(6) LA EDITION. Find out about Yuri’s Night in LA, April 9 at the California Science Center, on Facebook.

Join with 100+ events around the world in celebrating the 1st human mission to orbit the Earth and all space can make possible for us. Come to the pre-party, make your own space hero trader card, listen to Samantha Cristoforetti talk about her 199 days on ISS last year. Apollo 11 moonwalker, Buzz Aldrin, and Star Trek’s Lt Uhura, Nichelle Nichols will also be there. Your best playa wear or space costume is encourged. DJ Dynamix will be spinning till midnight! Don’t wait, event has sold out every year!

Will McIntosh is an exceptional writer whose work deserves more recognition than it gets. He won the Hugo Award several years ago for the excellent short story “Bridesicle,” but I wish people had paid more attention to his following novels and short stories. He does aliens really, really well.

However, this story has no aliens. It has dreamy magical realism instead.

This was recommended to me by Linda S, who was right — I loved it. I was trusting her when I didn’t quite have time to finish the book before nominations closed, which worked out fine because I liked the resolution quite a bit. But I notice one File 770 commenter said it might not be eligible. I don’t know why, but if not, too bad! I guess I should have nominated Bryony and Roses instead. Well, at least Ursula Vernon’s story “Wooden Feathers” was on a lot of lists; I was glad to see that.

Anyway, I have not had time to write a review of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, obviously, but I nominated it because it is a really fun SF space opera with a cluttered Star-Trek-Federation type of setting — I haven’t seen anybody tackle a setting like that for a long time. Actually, the closest background I can think of in recent SFF is in Tanya Huff’s Valor series.

I had quibbles here and there with the worldbuilding and story, but OMG did I ever love Kizzy, one of the Best! Characters! Ever! Chambers must have had so much fun writing her, seriously. I have a new ambition: to write a wild impulsive uninhibited extrovert who is as much fun as Kizzy. Wonderful character building through dialogue. I wound up becoming quite attached to all the characters, including the ones who were thoroughly unsympathetic at the beginning. I also liked the rather intimate feel of the story against the very wide-scale background, which Chambers pulled off despite frequently switching the pov. And as I say, I liked the resolution. There are sad things about the ending, but it is not a downer.

(9) INDIE. Today’s Brevity cartoon has a kind word for writers from Middle-Earth.

Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, the story follows a team of female scientists exploring “Area X,” a supposed environmental disaster zone in a future America. Portman’s character, never identified by name in the book, has the ulterior motive of looking for her husband, who was lost on an expedition. In the grand tradition of environmental disaster areas with creepy pedigrees, things get weird pronto for the expedition as Things Are Not What They Seem, but Portman is unlikely to stumble across a little green dude with a strange grasp of sentence structure.

OK I know what you’re thinking, what even is a Chief Wombat Cuddler? Well, you’ll be the chief… of… wombat cuddlng at Tassie’s Flinders Island. Makes perfect sense.

Apparently over the past few weeks, a cheeky wombat from our southernmost state has been getting quite a bit of attention online thanks to a real cute YouTube video. Derek the wombat – great wombat name, by the way – lives out on Flinders Island, and because the Internet is all but obsessed with him, the folk over on the island have decided he needs a little company….

All you have to do is fill out the application form here before 10pm on April 16. Entrants must be over the age of 18 and of course, love cuddling wombats. What are you waiting for!?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Michael J. Walsh, Will R., and Kyra for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor Cora.]

Comment navigation

a. I think that it is very plausible that slates will continue to get 25%, at least in the smaller categories, the ones where the 5% rule is an issue in the first place; therefore, even with EPH, a work will need more than 5% if it is to beat the slate. Slates have a similar effect to the 5% rule.

b. It’s a different question what needs to happen for us, the community, to beat the slates. That depends on what ‘beating the slate’ means. If you think it just means stopping them getting a sweep, it should be quite easy. At the other extreme, it might mean stopping them getting on the ballot at all, except coincidentally; I am inclined to favour this view, since slates do not represent real preferences, and can crowd genuinely deserving works out. This would be hard. A possible middle view is that we have beaten the slate if we get it down to its actual proportion of support, so that if 20% of voters support the slate it gets one slot on the ballot; EPH does not guarantee this, but may make it possible, given sufficient coherence in legit votes.

c. I still think Greg is missing something when he says the only hope for slates is to get things like ‘Space Raptor’ on the ballot. It is possible for someone to propose a slate consisting entirely of arguably worthy works, which will still skew the ballot in their direction, keeping other arguably worthy works, which don’t fit their ideology so well, out. This is a workable aim even if they don’t get a sweep, and as far as I can see they can go on doing it indefinitely.

d. It may be true that most people who look at the Hugos only pay attention to the winners, but there certainly are people who use award shortlists as guides to reading. Besides which, the system is set up so that we will have five works in each category to choose from; if some of those spots are not occupied by honestly chosen works, it distorts the system, leaving us to choose between three, or two, or in extreme cases one, so that the top legit nominee automatically becomes the winner.

e. Downvoting is a terrible idea, for all the reason that people have said.

f. So as to what we should if EPH fails to solve the problem; I’ve no idea. Lots of radical things were discussed at an early point; EPH was created as a less radical solution, but if it doesn’t work we may need to be more radical again. Expand the nominating body. Restrict the nominating body. Split the Hugos, and both expand and restrict the nominating body. Or something else.

It is presumably a form of downvoting, but the system I floated last year would have introduced an extra round of voting after the initial nominations. After the nomination round, the Administrator would release a list of the top fifteen “semi-finalists,” without contacting them, because these are not finalists. The semi-final ballot, with semi-finalists randomly ordered so you couldn’t tell had more nominations than any other, would be issued to the current Worldcon’s members only. Each would have a yes/no choice, on the question, “Does this semi-finalist deserve to be on the final ballot?” If a majority voted NO, that candidate would be eliminated. (Some suggest needing some sort of a super-majority, like 60%, to disqualify a nominee at this stage; the specific percentage is debatable.)

During semi-final voting, Administrators would also be contacting potential finalists (which would be helped by being able to make public appeals for how to contact them) and confirming eligibility (almost certainly helped by people pointing out that a given semi-finalist isn’t eligible).

At the end of the semi-final round, the five nominees with the most first-round nominations that:

1. Were not disqualified by a majority of the current Worldcon’s members voting them off the list
2. Were confirmed eligible
3. Were not declined by the nominee

…would be announced as finalists. The Administrators would not at this time announce what works were disqualified by being voted off the ballot (although the yes/no votes would be part of the post-award statistics when the top-5 figures were released). Nominee eligibility and nominees declining would be at the discretion of the Administrator.

That would have put paid to what happened last year, given how large the No Award voting was. As long as people can only nominate five per category, it would take a significantly larger and better-organized slate campaign to swamp all fifteen semi-final positions. That’s not to say it could not be done, but the more complicated you require a conspiracy to become, the more likely it is to fall apart of its own weight.

Yes, of course there would be organized campaigns to get people to vote against certain candidates, or even all of them (“Kill the Hugos”). However, inasmuch as it would take a majority (and possibly a super-majority) of the members of the current Worldcon voting to vote a potential finalist off the ballot, I think it would be difficult to burn the whole ballot down.

Why are people so terrified of “Space Raptor” on the shortlist? If a group protesting the Hugos had made that their tactic from the start I would have appreciated it a lot more than what the Puppies actually did. It would have been an obvious protest pick so they wouldn’t have to compare it to other nominees in quality. Nominating something outrageous is an effective way of making their voice heard, and over time it would become just another bit of Hugo trivia. Absurd as it is, the whole ‘surreal Kindle erotica’ thing is a genuine fad right now, so it’s not an arbitrary choice.

A few years back when Scalzi, Stross, and McGuire were getting nominated regularly, plenty of Hugo voters would have found the idea amusing. The context of the Rabids doing it alongside their other nominees ruins that approach, but even so, it’s probably less embarrassing than having Castalia House self-promotion and Puppy political rants on the ballot.

The obvious issue is that you’d either have to have everyone read triple the number of usual nominees, or accept that people are regularly making judgements on works they haven’t read. The former is a big ask, and I’m not a fan of the latter.

Although eligible to nominate for the first time in decades this year (by dint of membership of Helsinki), I decided not to make any nominations.

In part this was because as the deadline loomed, I felt I simply didn’t have sufficient breadth of knowledge of the eligible candidates. (About the only written fiction category I’d read anything at all in would have been Novel, and I think I’d read only about 4 possible candidates, one of which I would definitely not have nominated. This isn’t because I don’t read voraciously, but because I rarely read anything within year or so of it being published, and nowadays read very little at shorter lengths.)

A further reason, however, was that because of other Mundane commitments, I didn’t feel I could risk an unquantifiable amount of time going through the process.

Yes, I’m a very bad lazy Fan, but I don’t want to turn one of my few pleasures into a chore. I suspect I’m not alone in this feeling and/or these circumstances.

Addressing the other point, I agree absolutely that introducing any form of down-voting would be a terrible idea and, pace our Gracious Host, I too think it would be playing into the paws of the anti-Hugoists.

Kevin Standlee: It is presumably a form of downvoting, but the system I floated last year would have introduced an extra round of voting after the initial nominations.

Kevin, I can only tell you how I would respond to such a system: that is, I wouldn’t. I’d nominate, and then ignore the “downvote” round. Then I’d grit my teeth and use No Award on the final ballot, as appropriate to my opinion of the work in question. For a while. If I had to use No Award a lot, year after year–say, to the same extent that people had to use it last year, when the shortlist took most people by surprise–I would eventually stop participating.

One of the things I like about EPH is that it DOESN’T cut off slating entirely. Antithetical to the ideals of the Hugos as it may be, slating MIGHT represent a group of readers’ genuine opinions. Therefore, I can live with one or two works in any given category that aren’t to my taste–hey, I do that anyway, and I’ve never had any problem judging such works fairly. I don’t think. But being asked, year after year, to proclaim a certain number of works to be “unworthy” as part of the process–I don’t think I could do that.

The obvious issue is that you’d either have to have everyone read triple the number of usual nominees, or accept that people are regularly making judgements on works they haven’t read

The premise would have to be that we’re not asked to make a judgment of the work as such, only given an option to veto things we believe got an unfair push in the nomination. Voters would be saying yes or not to the work as a legitimate contender, not “yes, I like this book so it can go on” or “no, I didn’t like this book so it shouldn’t go on”. (If the premise is that voters should read the works first and say yes or no based on merit, we could just as well do without the semifinal yes/no-vote and call 5/15 a radical version of 4/6.)

I think it’s fair to make this sort of judgment without reading, just based on reviews and knowledge about whether a work was pushed by a slate. But I am not sure how well it would work in practice and how fandom in general would vote in a process like that. I fear that there would be a lot of pointless debate and fannish politics about how to vote in different circumstances.

The premise would have to be that we’re not asked to make a judgment of the work as such, only given an option to veto things we believe got an unfair push in the nomination. Voters would be saying yes or not to the work as a legitimate contender,…I think it’s fair to make this sort of judgment without reading, just based on reviews and knowledge about whether a work was pushed by a slate. But I am not sure how well it would work in practice and how fandom in general would vote in a process like that. I fear that there would be a lot of pointless debate and fannish politics about how to vote in different circumstances.

That’s about right. I wouldn’t expect people to read all fifteen works in a category.

The reason I prefer this over EPH is that EPH is arcane. Our final-ballot system (IRV) is difficult to explain to people, but EPH is even harder. While a three-round system adds complexity, each of the individual rounds is relatively easy to understand:

Round 1: Nominate up to five works. The fifteen with the most votes (first past the post) go to the next round.
Round 2: Vote Yes/No on each work. Any work that doesn’t get a majority against it can go on to the final ballot if it got enough nominations in the first round.
Round 3: The five works that survived Round 2 and had the most FPTP votes in Round 1 go onto the final ballot, where we vote by IRV as currently.

Remember that most people have difficulty understanding anything other than first-past-the-post voting, which is why someone can “win” a Presidential primary with 75% of the voters voting for other candidates. Simple Yes/No votes are easy for most people to understand.

I do think that this system makes the Administrator’s job harder, and it imposes additional costs upon the Worldcon committee. OTOH, I expect EPH to make the Administrator’s job harder as well, and it’s likely to produce a system that in my opinion requires the electorate to take it on faith that the system works because it’s so hard to understand. In fact, I would not be surprised to see us eventually end up adding a rule that requires the raw ballot date (without voter names, of course) be released, in order to allow anyone to run the nomination results through EPH themselves.

It’s not enough that rules be fair. It’s that they must be perceived as fair. I went through this last weekend as Parliamentarian of my county’s Democratic convention to select delegates to the state convention. There was someone who really, really wanted to speak, and had been trying for a while, but the Chair kept recognizing other people (legally), and eventually a super-super-majority (all but about five people) voted to close debate. The individual in question felt that he had been wronged even though the result was legal. This troubled me, because I think he’ll go away thinking that democracy itself has failed him.

It is presumably a form of downvoting, but the system I floated last year would have introduced an extra round of voting after the initial nominations. After the nomination round, the Administrator would release a list of the top fifteen “semi-finalists,” without contacting them, because these are not finalists. The semi-final ballot, with semi-finalists randomly ordered so you couldn’t tell had more nominations than any other, would be issued to the current Worldcon’s members only. Each would have a yes/no choice, on the question, “Does this semi-finalist deserve to be on the final ballot?” If a majority voted NO, that candidate would be eliminated. (Some suggest needing some sort of a super-majority, like 60%, to disqualify a nominee at this stage; the specific percentage is debatable.)

I have very mixed feelings given the way you word this. It doesn’t hit my gut in the same way @Greg Hullender’s downvoting suggestion did. Locking it so only Worlcon members can see it won’t work as someone will copy and share it with the world (or retyping it if you lock copying). With a super majority requirement of 60% it’s going to be harder for groups like SP/RP to game the system which is good. But I still have concerns this could quickly become divisive within the community. The outcry when something is put below NA is already divisive. This solution decreases the number of things likely to be put under NA but increases the number of speculation about what was voted not deserving to be on the ballot/voted off the island.

On the pro side this probably knocks off all SP/RP/future slate items. It possibly discourages future slating.

Would a new longlist be announced after the Hugo voting is over? Would this new longlist have the same prestige of previous years? I really liked The Hugo Longlist Anthology and would like to see it become a yearly tradition.

Frankly I’d prefer the interim voting to include the longlist and simply have voters rank them the same way we do the finalist without the NA option. I suspect a number of voters will go how did I forget that when I was nominating so voters might not be as badly read as some fear. Voters might find time to read the short fiction categories so books, fanzines, semiprozines, and fan writers would suffer the most from lack of time. Unfortunately a number of voters may rank based on what they’ve heard about stuff or a few reviews they read as this interim voting period will need to be short.

Frankly I’d prefer the interim voting to include the longlist and simply have voters rank them the same way we do the finalist without the NA option.

Besides the fact that I know even IRV makes people itchy in a way that yes/no and FPTP do not, my reason for not wanting to rank works in this hypothetical Round 2, is that this to me implies that everyone should be reading all fifteen works, and I think that’s too high a bar. The Semi-Final round is in fact for people to vote against things, and it’s clear that there’s a stripe in people who want to vote against stuff, not for it. Requiring at least a majority against further consideration puts a break on this negative impulse, while still allowing people to vent.

I would not expect a new long list after the winners would announce. The long list would include how many nominations a given work received and what the vote on the semi-finals were. We would then and only then learn what works might have made he final ballot had they not been knocked out of the semi-final round.

Oh, and as a matter of marketing, it might increase interest in the finalist announcements, inasmuch as we’d already know from which field of fifteen the Final Five were being drawn from. (Hm, I wonder if anyone has trademarked “Final Five?” *checks USPTO.gov* No active marks, but one that was abandoned in 2009. Wonder if the NCAA would contest the mark.)

EPH was tested to make sure that it would, absent special circumstances, produce similar results to the traditional voting system. I am not sure that it will in fact do so in every case; in particular, it is quite likely to produce different results in BDP Short Form (which of course did not exist in 1983, the year that was used for the test). But since BDPSF is widely agreed to be problematic I don’t think that matters that much. I am also still worried about how EPH will handle single issue campaigns. But in any case, the system does attempt to be consistent with historic results.

I am very doubtful that this proposal will be consistent with historic results. It is not only slated works that people will want to vote down. If it had been in force in 2011, there would certainly have been a significant campaign to vote down Blackout/All Clear. The reaction to that result needed to be seen to be believed; it was not just ‘this is not a very good book, and I don’t think it deserves the award’; it was more on the lines of ‘how dare you?’, and suggestions that the Hugos were irrevocably damaged by it winning. I wasn’t following things in 2001, but as I understand it there was a similar reaction to Harry Potter then. And it is quite likely that this year, even without slates, there would be a similar campaign against Seveneves.

I am also rather afraid that we would have to read everything, or at least read all slated works in what would have to be a very short time period; those who reject slated works out of hand could do that easily, but those who were assessing slated works on quality would still have to read them. (And there might be more than one slate. Counting the SP list as a slate, there is now.)

I’m not at all sure there *would* have been a campaign to vote down Blackout/All Clear. My own thoughts about that book would, if expressed here in detail, probably get me banned for overuse of abusive language — I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever read that wasn’t on last year’s Rabid Puppies slate — but it’s a book that was written by someone respected in the genre, it was clearly enjoyed by many, and it was an utterly legitimate nomination. I voted it under No Award on the final ballot, but I wouldn’t have supported it being kicked off the ballot — and I was toward the extreme end of those displeased by the book.

Fandom already indulges in too many petty personal feuds — let’s not encourage that by setting up a formal mechanism for it by downvoting. We have No Award; if you think a finalist is crap, it goes after that. I’ve done that to plenty of non-slate works over the years, regardless of their SJW content.

@Steve Davidson: a formal statement would be nice. Is there anyone who could bring this to the Business Meeting? Maybe next year, I have a feeling the Meetings are going to be plenty long and arduous this year as-is.

@Kevin: That mechanism has a great deal of merit to it. It sure would have allowed last year’s ballot to reflect the actual feelings of the majority. But yet another round of voting — oy!

@Paul: By golly, you’re right about Amazon reviews. When did that happen? I didn’t notice. Hrm. While I’m in favor of niceness, I used the “X out of Y found this helpful” as another datapoint in my book-buying decisions. But then I make most decisions by clicking on the “All negative reviews” (1, 2, and 3 stars). Too many of the 5 stars on self-pub are pure puffery from friends and family, which is nice but maybe not helpful if the f&f don’t read widely in the genre of the book. I’ve seen so many 5 star “What an original idea!!!” reviews given to SF concepts that were trite in the 60’s.

But the one and two star reviews point out flaws which are often the things that put me off, like atrocious grammar and no editing. Some of them aren’t useful to me, but are to others, like the many many many people who simply can’t deal with cussing. (Which I find confusing when they’re reviewing a serial killer mystery with graphic details — they’re fine with reading about stalking and entrails, but draw the line at “shit”?) Plus, the one-star reviews are often pretty funny.

If we had a second round, as per Kevins proposal, I think I would like there to be a majority of at least two thirds to remove an item. That would be so decisive that there wouldn’t really need to be more discussions. If more than one third of the voters thinks an item is award worthy, then it should be deemed as that.

And as to hinder manipulations, the only people who would get to vote in the second round would be people who bought voting rights before nomination end.

If we had a second round, as per Kevin’s proposal, I think I would like there to be a majority of at least two thirds to remove an item.

Personally, I’m inclined toward something between 50% and 60% as the amount required to disqualify a nominee from consideration as a finalist. To consider how much it would take to make people that negative, have a look at what the No Award first-ballot percentages were last year:

These are only the categories where No Award out-polled the field, getting an outright majority on the first ballot and resulting in no Hugo Award being presented in those categories. In some categories, No Award finished ahead of some, but not all, of the finalists. There were no cases where No Award did not win a “knockout” first-ballot victory but came back to “win” the category.

If we were to go with such a system, I’d argue against any value greater than 60% (three-fifths), but I can certainly see the attraction of two-thirds or even three-fourths as the necessary super-majorities.

howloon: Why are people so terrified of “Space Raptor” on the shortlist?… A few years back when Scalzi, Stross, and McGuire were getting nominated regularly, plenty of Hugo voters would have found the idea amusing.

The “plenty of Hugo voters” you know are obviously an entirely different group of people than the Hugo voters I know, none of which would have ever found having Space Raptor on the ballot amusing.

First of all I think it’s far from a certainty that the aforementioned “Space Raptor” will make it. Secondly, even if it does, I’m not entirely convinced that it would be the eternal mark of shame – it would involve an ongoing post-script (one that would be very useful whenever someone asks “Why is the nomination systems so complicated?”)

“Gosh, Grandpa Snowcrash, this Beale person sounds like he was a real asshole.”

“Why, yes, Timmy. Yes, he was.”

And on the more important topic…

The Sum Of All Fears Tom Clancy
The Firm John Grisham
The Stars Shine Down Sidney Sheldon
Waiting To Exhale Terry McMillan
Executive Orders Tom Clancy
Cause Of Death Patricia Cornwall
A Man In Full Tom Wolfe
Irresistible Forces Danielle Steele

I still have reservations but if only those who can vote (not just nominate) and at a minimum 2/3rds I might over time be talked around to Kevin Standlee’s proposed additional voting pass. Or at least not outright hate it. I’m still uncomfortable with it.

@JJ
Not having read Space Raptor I have no opinion on the work itself. Given the slate its on* I don’t expect to read it so unless it somehow wins a Hugo I’ll never know how embarrassed I should be if it makes it to finalist.

*unlike many here I take the position if something got on the ballot by slate/loophole it’s not worthy of my time to read and is left off my final ballot unless the nominee disavowed slates. I’ll accept someone asking to be removed from SP4 as disavowal of RP2. If I remember someone making anti-slate statements last year I consider them covered. I am using my own judgement on cases where a situation is not cut and dried.

Seems to work best if the last word is (or especially, if it can be reinterpreted as) a verb. Works ok if it’s a preposition. Also works if it can be interpreted as an adjective, but the results don’t seem to be quite as funny in general (though there are definite exceptions).

The lowest category, really not even legitimate, is simple apposition, in which the title ends with a noun that is “hilariously” “reinterpreted” as being the author. E.g., The Whim of the Dragon Pamela Dean.

Better examples actually reinterpret at least one word. This is most often titles of the form “The [adjective / descriptor] [noun]”, which turns into “The [substantive noun] [transitive verb]”. E.g., The Gilded Chain Dave Duncan, or from upthread, The Phoenix Guards Steven Brust. The degenerate case is found in a single-noun title that turns into a verb in imperative mood; e.g., Fear L. Ron Hubbard, or Feed Mira Grant.

It’s a little ironic that the ur-example which gives us the name of the game is really not a very good example, since all it does is reinterpret an intransitive noun as transitive.

The highest level involves reinterpreting part of the author’s name. This is also the rarest, since very few author names lend themselves to it. Two Sisters Gore Vidal is the only fully canonical example, although if we allow a variation in the form we can have Tim Powers The Anubis Gates.

The highest level involves reinterpreting part of the author’s name. This is also the rarest, since very few author names lend themselves to it. Two Sisters Gore Vidal is the only fully canonical example, although if we allow a variation in the form we can have Tim Powers The Anubis Gates.

Othello Will Shakespeare?
Blood And Gold Anne Rice?
Less of a Stranger Nora Roberts?
All That Remains Pat Cornwall?

@Terry Hunt: Heh, I like this phrase, “anti-Hugoists” (though it sounds a bit like they’re against Hugoists, not against the Hugos – but I know what you mean).

@Kevin Standlee: To me, a properly-explained (simple terms) EPH isn’t arcane. Maybe I’m weird. 😉 Anyway, I don’t like your idea, sorry; it seems like a downvote in a separate round, like a pre-No-Award. I don’t like the downvote concept, but also this adds complexity, is gamable (especially as some folks, like @Mary Frances, would just skip this round), and it would make the nom-vote cycle longer (which is a drawback to me).

I don’t see why anyone would (side from initially) think raw data was needed to double-check the admins for EPH. They use software now. But then, I don’t believe a significant number of people feel EPH isn’t fair. Slaters just don’t like it because it weakens slates a little. I may be unusual in this, but I believe EPH is more fair than the current system, as the results more accurately reflect/weigh voter preferences, by weighing noms more strongly as other noms lose out.

In contrast, your idea does actually seem unfair to me – negating nominations before they come to an actual read-and-vote-please round. (No Award during the voting round works differently, it seems to me anyway.)

/Ramble. Anyway, it’s interesting to see an alternate take on the downvote, even if I don’t like it any more than @Greg Hullender’s idea.

I don’t see why anyone would (side from initially) think raw data was needed to double-check the admins for EPH. They use software now.

At the moment, we get to see the vote totals for finalists and the nearest losers. It’s obvious how they determine the result. In effect, that is the raw data; vote-counting software was used to generate it, but that’s a mechanical procedure, and it’s the totals which determine the outcome.

Under EPH, on the other hand, the result is determined by the details of everyone’s vote, so to know how the result was reached we have to know that. So EPH involves a loss either of transparency or of privacy; I don’t see any way round that.

@Andrew M: I thought of that, but the info released for the winner and how it all shook out (a) isn’t really raw data, and (b) is for finalists only. That part isn’t changing. For nominations, there’s zero data like that released; just the top 5, and later on, a larger list. So I’m not sure that really counts as a loss of transparency.

But I’ve been wondering lately whether the details released for the finalists are mandated, or just customary. I’ve been told in the past (maybe by someone who didn’t know what they were talking about) that there’s no second place in the Hugos, despite the bizarre info released that says there is. I’m not sure which is right.

BTW, I did say “side from initially” and I meant “aside from initially” – even then, I doubt I’ll be alone in not needing to see raw data (and again – raw data isn’t released now).

3.11.4: The complete numerical vote totals, including all preliminary tallies for first, second, . . . places, shall be made public by the Worldcon Committee within ninety (90) days after the Worldcon. During the same period the nomination voting totals shall also be published, including in each category the vote counts for at least the fifteen highest vote-getters and any other candidate receiving a number of votes equal to at least five percent (5%) of the nomination ballots cast in that category, but not including any candidate receiving fewer than five votes.